How 27-Year-Old Former High School Dropout Finds Herself Graduating From USC

EXPOSITION PARK (CBSLA.com) — Nicole Daviau's story proves anything is possible if you put your mind to it.

CBS2's Amy Johnson said Daviau was a high school dropout who accepted a challenge.

And now she's about to graduate from USC.

These days, she walks confidently and proudly around the USC campus, but it's a place she once considered very foreign.

"I just didn't think that USC was the kind of place for a student that had my background," Daviau says.

She dropped out of high school just weeks after starting her freshman year.

"I was kind of living on my own young age, my instrument broke, which was like my passion, my main reason for going to school, and pretty soon after that, I stopped going altogether."

She began a nanny job, and it was the children who urged her to go back to school.

Daviau did, but with just weeks to complete her GED, she was out again. She said she was unmotivated and surrounded by bad influences.

Eventually, she returned home and back to school.

"I hustled back to the high school and begged them to let me back in," she recalls.

She finished and went on to junior college, earning her associate degree in six years.

"I had no plans to go anywhere, really. I was pretty much proud of myself that I finished community college," Daviau says.

One professor urged her to apply to USC and she got in, but it wasn't easy.

""I had this really weird feeling that I still didn't belong," she said.

A series of workshops for transfer students, especially first-generation college students like Daviau called Transformation Tuesdays, helped change all that.

"Walking into this university. I was one person," she says. "Kind of scared and afraid of what the world still had to offer me. But walking out, I'm this completely different person."

Daviau will graduate from Friday with a bachelor's degree in business administration. She already has a job lined up.

"In July,  I'll start a position with Aramark as an associate district manager in their management rotation program," she says.

She encourages all young students to stay in school.

"I never want to be the person that says if I can do it, you can do it," Daviau says, "Because everyone comes from different circumstances in their lives, and they have their own hardships. But I do challenge people to get out of their comfort zone and try it."